In Spirit and in Truth

In Spirit and in Truth

By Fred Pruitt

(Taken from an email/article first written in 2002, updated and expanded just a bit for 2017. Wow, that’s 15 years ago! Time flies!!)

As the reality of the inwardness of God and He as “me” has become more and more settled in me, the Scriptures have taken on a more and more inward meaning that is intimately personal, and less and less a “line upon line, precept upon precept,” sort of an “over there,” here’s how it is” meaning. I don’t know if i make myself clear, but that’s the best I can do in describing it.

At times, the realization that everything is “inner consciousness” has billowed over my mind so strongly that I’ve thought myself to have been almost swept away. It has been hard to get a “concept” of “GOD!” All my ideas and thoughts and descriptions and theories “about” God are swept away in the Mystery of His Person. I no longer find myself able to “grasp Him” because I have found Him to be beyond my conceptual level. I cannot “describe” Him.

This has changed everything for me ….

Looking at the gospels, Jesus is to me living from a spontaneous uprising of the Spirit in Himself in each new situation. He asked no one their doctrinal position, nor even demanded any sort of confession sin, but instead looked only for faith. He came to heal the sick, not those who were well in their own minds. And to those who saw themselves as well in their own minds, His Love responded with the necessary words or actions in the moment. Some of those caught up in themselves he spoke to gently, and others filled him with anger. There is no pattern you can discern, though many have tried to describe and emulate the “principles” Jesus operated by. However, we know he operated by no “set of principles,” nor by a “philosophy,” but by the ever-begetting newness of the Life of the Father within Him.

“Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” (Ps 2:7). That means to me, that the Life of the Son is continuously (this day) begotten of the Father, so that He ever appears in newness and propagation in spontaneity as ourselves in Him.

In looking at the stories of the Old Testament, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, David, on down to the disciples in the gospels, I see God living and manifesting His Life in the lives of these ordinary human beings. Yes, they are moral lessons, yes they portray certain right principles of life, yes, there is much in them that indicates psychological difficulties, but more than that, to me, they are the stories of people living lives spontaneously as who they really were, regardless of the depths of their knowledge, because they are stories more of faith and love than of knowledge, stories of living in God in the spontaneity daily human living.

All of course, with God’s purpose behind each, because in the spontaneity of the Living Water flowing through their lives, the plan of God has unfolded more and more widely down through the centuries, so that finally all things on the earth take their central point from Calvary, whether backwards from Calvary or forward from it. As it is on earth, so it is in heaven, in that in the center of the Throne is an Eternal Lamb Slain. And all heavenly things as well as earthly things take that as their central point from which all else emanates.

For years, my writings reflected my “line upon line, precept upon precept” consciousness. Eventually it actually caused a collapse in me, and I took a 12-year sabbatical, and wrote nothing whatsoever of these things, and even tried even to not think of them. I tried to forget these things, for Ahab and Jezebel frightened me and I was overwhelmed and saw myself more than I saw God so I went and hid in a cave in the desert. (Actually it was a mobile home out in the country with a fishing pond out back.)

Storms and thunder came and ravens fed me and then one day I heard a still small voice ….

It said, “Get up, dust yourself off, I AM” ….

So now when I write “Christ is the seed in every man,” I don’t mean it as a precept everyone should take now as truth to be put in some outline or treatise or course in theology.

I MEAN Christ IS all in all, that “by Him all things consist,” that even if you don’t see Him or know Him or recognize Him, He still IS the “fulness that fills all in all,” and there is nowhere where He is not in His fulness.

When Jesus told the woman at the well that “God is Spirit, and they that worship Him worship Him in Spirit and in Truth,” instead of siding with the Jews that the temple in Jerusalem was the place to worship, or the mountain in Samaria as the Samaritans said, He said that God, being Spirit, can ONLY be known inwardly where we ourselves are spirit, that there is NO OTHER place where God can be “found,” and that whenever we have felt ourselves touched and drawn of God, it has welled up from the deepest depths within us.

To me there is a “place” within us of infinity which opens up into God and quite beyond “ourselves” and any “notion” we might have of God, for as the Scriptures say God does not dwell in a temple made with hands, so also does He not dwell within the limited notions we have of Him.

But He does dwell within the Mystery of His own Selfhood, which we find to be at the depths of our very selves where in Him we are one spirit with Him. (1 Cor 6:17; John 17:11, 20-23). We only find this “place” in the new birth and the Cross.

Therefore, I mean, “Christ is the seed in every man,” is to be discerned inwardly from the Spirit, because there is no “outer” God, apart from us, way up there, over there, up in heaven. All of that is IN us!

I think for a lot of us it takes a long time to sink in, that when in our consciousness we stepped into Christ and He stepped into us and took us into His deepest intimacy, what a complete shift in consciousness occurred. Some of it was almost instantaneous, but the rest of it the Spirit releases over time like a “time-released” medication, so that the effects grow greater and greater through the whole of our lives. We might have started out as a spindly little shoot coming out of the ground with little hope for survival. But it was not our own water that watered us, nor was it our own light that shone upon us and sustained us, eventually bringing forth fruit from us in due season. Nor was it our own wind that blew this way and that and took us up into itself; it was the wind of God, about which we can only say that it came up as it pleased and went in whatever direction it pleased. No one can predict it or follow it, but riding the Wind is possible.

This is not business as usual. This is not Christianity as usual. This is tearing every mask off and revealing everything everywhere for what it is. If anything is “judgment,” that is it.

I know that sounds scary for some. It needn’t be. He will have in His Hand His Reward for every believer. No one will ever know a greater, more joyous, more crowded, homecoming, than the Day we drink wine with Him after He has come into His Kingdom! (Luke 22:14-20). Every one of us will be there. All at the same time. For this meal, Martha doesn’t have to work! We can all sit down, at the same time, and all be served at the same time, and all enjoy fully the fellowship at the same time, going on forever and ever and ever.

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3 thoughts on “In Spirit and in Truth”

ahhh waters of rest…I too have been a long time at the Brook Cherith…and only an hour ago I had put on an old praise and worship CD and they were singing ‘let your voices arise on the music up to Him on the throne’ and suddenly my mind was offended at the way they painted God to be way up there and us way down here…and I could no longer join in singing…something that vexes me and saddens me no end Fred. I asked Carmel my wife, “You gotta help me get past this doctrinal blockage that stops me worshiping–God is not out there up there somewhere, I cannot do that!?” Your reminder and encouragement came an hour later to remind me of my location in Him and He in me. Thanks Fred!! Yo are right though, it takes some of us a long time to grasp the shift in consciousness…I been reading you and D.Yordy since 2009/10!!